ABSTRACT
There is something curiously and yet intermittently fascinating about Donne. His fame has been fitful. After the obscuration of the eighteenth century Coleridge and Lamb felt a charm which has been potent with some later critics. Browning was drawn to him by a congenial subtlety of intellect, and Lowell, an equally ardent lover of all that is quaint and witty, read and annotated him carefully. But his poetry seems to be for the select few. Not one of his lyrics appears in The Golden Treasury, whether because Palgrave disliked a style which is the antithesis of Tennyson’s, or because he thought it unfit for the ordinary reader. To read Donne’s verses is, indeed, for most people, to crack very hard nuts on a doubtful chance of finding a sweet kernel. Mr Gosse, in the ‘Life’ which has just appeared, professes his belief that Donne contains the quintessence of poetry; but even Dr Jessopp-an enthusiastic admirer of the prose-honestly confesses that the poems are not to his taste. I may, therefore, take courage to confess that I too find them rather indigestible. They contain, I do not doubt, the true spirit; but I rarely get to the end, even of the shortest, without being repelled by some strange discord in form or in substance which sets my teeth on edge. Yet I am attracted as much as repelled. The man himself excites my curiosity. What was the character and the mind that could utter itself in so unique a fashion? Nothing less could have been required than extraordinary talents at the service of a most peculiar idiosyncracy and exposed to some trying combination of circumstance.
